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Category Archives: IT Service Continuity

I enjoy the conversations I have with students attending our ITIL® courses. They normally revolve around the maturity of their organisation compared to documented best practice. This has led Sysop to put a survey in the field to see if we could establish the overall take-up and maturity of IT service management. The results are somewhat alarming:

OVER 50% OF COMPANIES ARE NOT READY FOR MAJOR INCIDENTS! • Over a third have an IT-business alignment problem • 37% point to low or no IT professional development • 13% have no Change Manager

33% of respondents say they ‘need to do more to align their IT with the business’, with 4% admitting that their IT-business alignment is ‘poor’. Almost two in ten also say that management has ‘no understanding’ (5%) or a ‘poor understanding’ (14%) of the importance of IT to the business.

Remember that IT Service Management is, for the most part, a cultural change. To bring about this level of change requires patience and tenacity. I would endorse the methodology suggested by Dr. John Kotter – it has just eight steps.

Step 1: Establish a Sense of Urgency
Help others see the need for change and they will be convinced of the importance of acting immediately.

Step 2: Create the Guiding Coalition
Assemble a group with enough power to lead the change effort, and encourage the group to work as a team. Make sure this group includes a senior management sponsor, management buy-in is key.

Step 3: Develop a Change Vision
Create a vision to help direct the change effort, and develop strategies for achieving that vision.

Step 4: Communicate the Vision for Buy-in
Make sure as many as possible understand and accept the vision and the strategy.

Step 6: Generate Short-term Wins
Plan for achievements that can easily be made visible, follow-through with those achievements and recognise and reward employees who were involved. If you are a million miles from having a Configuration Management System, despite the fact that it would be wonderful, to have one in place don’t even try to start with this! Look at the areas that you already do pretty well but could do better, this will give you a good starting point.
Approach the task by trying to see which gaps in your processes you could bridge with least effort.

Step 7: Never Let Up
Use increased credibility to change systems, structures, and policies that don’t fit the vision, also hire, promote, and develop employees who can implement the vision, and finally reinvigorate the process with new projects, themes, and change agents.

Step 8: Incorporate Changes into the Culture
Articulate the connections between the new behaviours and organizational success, and develop the means to ensure leadership development and succession. Remember the advice of W. Edwards Deming: gradual, incremental changes are most easily assimilated.

The ITIL® core volume Service Operation is not particularly helpful with regard to Major Incidents. It basically says: “A separate procedure, with shorter timescales must be used for ‘major’ incidents. A definition of what constitutes a major incident must be agreed and ideally mapped onto the overall incident prioritization scheme – such that they will be dealt with through this separate procedure.”

In our recent “Managing Major Incidents” workshops we have had an opportunity to discuss the topic with a good cross-section of IT professionals; to present our thoughts and; perhaps more importantly, gain valuable feedback as to what represents best practice in the field. What follows is our distillation of that best practice and a corresponding process flow to help support it.

Key Recommendations

1. Be clear what your organisation means by “Major Incident”
2. Appoint one person (preferably the Service Delivery Manager) to determine the severity of the MI and to invoke the MI process if appropriate.
3. Gather together a “war cabinet” of key people to help ensure that adequate, appropriate resources are made available to speedily resolve the MI.
4. Make certain that any escalation to the business can happen speedily and effectively.
5. Place the Disaster Recovery team on stand-by.
6. Be prepared to de-escalate as a solution emerges.

More Information

More information, including a practical process flow and narrative that we believe represents industry best practice in this particular area, is available from the Sysop Resource Centre http://www.sysop.co.uk/your-account/downloads.

You will need to log-in, and possibly register, on the website to access the downloadable resources area. Once there, you will see the categories of downloadable resources, the first of which is “Articles”. Click VIEW RESOURCES and you will see that the first two articles are the Major Incident Process Flow and Managing Major Incidents narrative.

News this week from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) – “the impacts of global warming are likely to be “severe, pervasive and irreversible”. After a winter in the UK that has seen major storms and rainfall we can expect more incidents of severe weather as we go forward.

Worldwide, the carbon footprint of IT is actually larger than that of the airline industry – and it’s growing. As more and more of the developing world adopt information technology, the carbon emissions generated will increase with it.

There was political news too. Centrica warned that government policy would likely lead to energy shortages in the UK and electrical black-outs. Strangely, this isn’t new. In 2012 the government forecasted a 20% shortfall in electricity forecast for the years 2015-2017. This, they said, was due to a number of factors that would create “a perfect storm”.

Dirty, coal powered power stations that fail to meet agreed emission targets must close by 2015.

Existing Magnox nuclear power stations are reaching the end of their life.

Wind, renewables and AGR nuclear plants will not cover the shortfall.

Reduced demand due to the recession has delayed the build of new capacity. Even if the building programme is restarted, it is unlikely that any new plants will be online before 2017.

Whatever way you look at it, we must all do whatever we can to reduce our energy usage.

Data Centres continue to grow exponentially and even though the latest servers are more energy efficient, the number deployed is ever-rising as too is the number of desk-top and mobile devices.

In these circumstances is it not incredible that few IT Managers are held accountable for the energy cost of the IT deployed to support the business. Sure, they have initiated hardware rationalisation projects but the outcomes of these projects are measured in cost savings not energy savings.

We must push ‘Green IT’ higher up the strategic agenda. The government has done much to “Green” governmental ICT. The Greening Government ICT strategy is intended to minimise the impact of the UK Government on the environment and reduce both green-house gas emissions and waste in support of the Government’s commitment to achieve a 25% reduction in green-house emissions by 2015.

It’s time IT Manager’s followed this lead and set their own targets for energy reduction and carbon emissions. Highly principled, reputable companies like Unilever do this. Let us all follow suit.

I’ve been banging on quite a bit lately about the looming energy crisis and why IT professionals need to act to reduce their energy use. I thought it would be useful to set out the background to the challenges we face.

Government Policy

In its annual energy statement (Nov 2011), the Department of Energy and Climate Change said government policies would increase the cost of electricity by 27% by 2020.

Data Centre Growth

Data Centres continue to grow exponentially and even though the latest servers are more energy efficient, the number deployed is ever-rising. These large-scale data centres already exceed the capacity of some urban electricity sub-stations and organisations who have or had data centres in central London and Canary Wharf are already moving to the country.

Government Forecasts

In the supporting documentation for the UK Climate Change Bill, the government forecasts a 20% shortfall in electricity forecast for the years 2015-2017. This is due to a number of factors that create “a perfect storm”.

Dirty, coal powered power stations that fail to meet agreed emission targets must close by 2015.

Existing Magnox nuclear power stations are reaching the end of their life.

Wind, renewables and AGR nuclear plants will not cover the shortfall.

Reduced demand due to the recession has delayed the build of new capacity. Even if the building programme is restarted, it is unlikely that any new plants will be online before 2017.

This is why Sysop is working very closely with Lord Redesdale (Chairman of the Carbon Management Association) to develop a package of training courses to further spread the awareness and take-up of best practice energy management in ICT. Focusing on Financial Directors, we plan to educate and help transform energy management within UK organisations.

I am presenting at the itSMF conference in November – “Keeping the Lights On”, Tuesday morning, after coffee; and will set out some good practice techniques that can reduce IT energy demand by 40% or more.

Without a doubt, we need to get really serious about exploring the Green dimension to managing our IT. The ISEB Foundation Certificate in Green IT is a really good starting point. This link to the BCS website contains more information as does the Sysop website.

It’s been a week of Green initiatives that may have been lost in the excitement of Euro 2012 and the Olympics build up. It serves to remind me how Green issues and energy consumption are so vitally important to the IT Industry and also, sadly, how few of us are taking action.

The United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development in Rio (Rio+20) aims to secure renewed political commitment for sustainable development, assess the progress to date and the remaining gaps in the implementation of the outcomes of the major summits on sustainable development, and address new and emerging challenges.

The UK government has, this week, announced mandatory Carbon Reporting for top 1800 businesses.

Reporting will be in addition to other schemes, e.g. Carbon Reduction Commitment

Reporting will be reviewed in 2015, with a view to roll out to all large businesses from 2016

Like it, or not we are all going to have to be more involved in measuring and reducing the carbon footprint of the organisations for which we work. Much of the carbon footprint of UK organisations is generated by their IT – be it in-house or transferred to an Outsourcer. The carbon footprint of the IT Industry is now greater than that of the global airline industry. Some 40% of the energy consumption within a typical administration complex is due to that used by the IT infrastructure.

It is ironic that, in many organisations, the energy required to cool IT equipment is actually higher than that needed to power it in the first place. Some organisations are already re-locating their data centres outside of London because there is insufficient capacity locally to ensure continuity of supply.

Being Green is a generic term used to label any product or action meant to help the environment. It can mean many things to different people. For example: buying products made of sustainable material; products that are made with natural ingredients; eating locally or organically; eating less or without meat; conserving energy; using renewable energy or clean energy; creating your own energy; planting trees; recycling, etc.

Without a doubt, we need to get really serious about exploring the Green dimension to managing our IT. The ISEB Foundation Certificate in Green IT is a really good starting point. This link to the BCS website contains more information as does the Sysop website.

Many IT service continuity plans are fundamentally flawed. Most business managers expect that all IT services will be restored within 48 hours or so of a disaster. Alarmingly, Sysop research indicates that it may actually take six months before all services are returned to normal!

The mismatch between expectation and practical delivery is brought about by a number of incorrect assumptions, including:

that non-critical services can be recovered in similar timescales to the “mission critical” services for which detailed ITSC plans have been developed.

that all services can be recovered to readily available “commodity hardware”.

that suitably-qualified IT personnel will be available to support the recovery in the numbers required for the time required.

But crucially, the most significant factor is the high levels of support effort required to sustain the newly-recovered services. This support commitment will drastically reduce the resource available to recover the remaining services.

Most IT departments have around 20% of their services defined as “mission critical” in a total population in excess of 50.Some 80% of services will take more than two weeks to recover; 50% will take more than a month; 25% will take more than three months.

IT Services Need to be Available in a Crisis
Experience of major contingencies (i.e. those that affect more than just IT infrastructure) reveals that emergency co-ordination teams need effective IT immediately. As the precise nature and impact of the contingency cannot be predicted, IT specialist resource is needed to provide emergency co-ordination teams with their requirements in an efficient and flexible manner. This activity will always take priority over the recovery of routine IT. As organisations become increasingly IT dependent it becomes even more necessary for routine IT (and the data / information upon which management depend) to be available to manage the crisis.

Building a Disaster Tolerant Infrastructure
By planning strategically it is possible to develop an I.T. infrastructure capable of maintaining IT service continuity throughout even a major contingency. modern server clustering and data storage mirroring can ensure the automatic fail-over of every single system within minutes – requiring no resource, intervention or dependency on scarce IT skills. With correct planning a highly-available infrastructure can be implemented with no overall increase in the Total Cost of Ownership.